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Michael Moynihan interviews Ahmed Akkari, the “baby-faced religious leader” who played a crucial role in inciting riots during the Danish cartoon controversy. But since then, Akkari has renounced fundamentalism and is now living in Greenland, hiding from his fanatical former friends:

There is no simple explanation for why he flipped, but Akkari’s time in Greenland, having emerged from the swamps of Islamism, was crucial. “In Greenland, I had space and time—and I had the public library. I started reading.” It was there, shrouded in Arctic anonymity, that he confronted his own prejudices, reading books of philosophy, history, and sociology, ultimately consuming—but, he admits, not always comprehending—Danish existentialist philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard.

“In 2011 for the first time I read an Islam critic.” It was the work of Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd, an Egyptian scholar exiled from his homeland and forced by an Egyptian court to annul his marriage for the “crime” of apostasy. His writings transformed Akkari. “He made me move further with my break from Islamism,” a system that he now views as “a way of controlling people. You use God, you use metaphysics, and that’s very strong.”…

During the cartoon crisis, a popular Saudi imam told Al Jazeera that free speech was the enemy of religious faith: “The problem is that [the Danes] want to open up … everything for debate. That’s it. It begins with freedom of thought, it continues with freedom of speech, and it ends up with freedom of belief.”

It now seemed a prescient observation, because it was liberalism, the consumption of dissenting ideas—the very thing he had once dedicated his life to shutting down—that changed Ahmed Akkari. Jacob Mchangama argues that, for Akkari, the Danish tradition of free speech acted as a disinfectant. “The Akkari affairs shows the fallacy of the argument that we need to ‘compromise’ and be ‘pragmatic’ when it comes to free speech and religious sensitivities.”

Kimberly Winston highlights a new documentary, Hug an Atheist, that tries to put “a more human, middle-of-the-road face on American atheism”:

The 90-minute film is the project of Sylvia Broeckx, a 35-year-old Belgian who lives in England and has been an atheist and humanist since her teens. She became interested in America’s perception of nonbelievers when some American friends and fellow atheists shared their own stories of feeling marginalized. “I always assumed America was founded on freedom of religion and was very much like Europe where if you are an atheist it is no big deal,” she said. “When I discovered that in America being an atheist could be a big problem, that was really a shock to me.”

Daniel Fincke emphasizes that the film isn’t about winning arguments:

Hug An Atheist is not a polemic against theism. It’s not filled with arguments against the existence of God or complaints with religious organizations. Supernatural ideas come up more as either nuisances to deal with or paltry suggestions to dismiss than as problems. While occasionally throughout the film, the atheists in it will reflect about when they were religious and make comparisons and contrasts to their current views, there is not much discussion justifying or explaining the thought processes that made them into atheists. The film’s point is neither to justify nor advance non-belief in gods. While they take the time regularly to rebuff familiar religious answers to questions or religious challenges to atheists, the point is to show how atheists think and live in positive and honest terms, how they make sense of their lives and their values, and how they deal with some of the most central and universal questions of human life.

Amanda Hess explores the growing phenomenon of microporn, “explicit photos, videos, and GIFs that are as short as winks”:

Today, the full-length film experience has been subsumed by short clips that can be chopped, remixed, and compiled into endless sexual combinations. [Novice pornographer] David distills his exploits into six-second loops. Amateur editors cut professional porn flicks into even shorter animated GIFs, then Tumblr curators like Kayla shoot them to all their followers. It used to be that people would “watch porn by fast-forwarding through most of it to get to their favorite parts,” says Fleshbot founder and editor Lux Alptraum. But GIFs “hone in on the hottest part of the action” — on “that perfect cum shot, or those breasts bouncing, or the moment of insertion, or whatever it is that really drives you wild.” And they repeat instantly — no hands necessary.

But it’s causing problems for social networking sites:

In an excerpt from his new book on Austrian satirist Karl Kraus, Jonathan Franzen reveals his quasi-apocalyptic take on modernity:

If I’d been born in 1159, when the world was steadier, I might well have felt, at 53, that the next generation would share my values and appreciate the same things I appreciated; no apocalypse pending. But I was born in 1959, when TV was something you watched only during prime time, and people wrote letters and put them in the mail, and every magazine and newspaper had a robust books section, and venerable publishers made long-term investments in young writers, and New Criticism reigned in English departments, and the Amazon basin was intact, and antibiotics were used only to treat serious infections, not pumped into healthy cows.

It wasn’t necessarily a better world (we had bomb shelters and segregated swimming pools), but it was the only world I knew to try to find my place in as a writer. And so today, 53 years later, Kraus’s signal complaint – that the nexus of technology and media has made people relentlessly focused on the present and forgetful of the past – can’t help ringing true to me. Kraus was the first great instance of a writer fully experiencing how modernity, whose essence is the accelerating rate of change, in itself creates the conditions for personal apocalypse. Naturally, because he was the first, the changes felt particular and unique to him, but in fact he was registering something that has become a fixture of modernity. The experience of each succeeding generation is so different from that of the previous one that there will always be people to whom it seems that any connection of the key values of the past have been lost. As long as modernity lasts, all days will feel to someone like the last days of humanity.

Jennifer Weiner takes exception to the part of Franzen’s writing that disparages “‘Jennifer Weiner-ish’ self promotion”:

In his essay, Franzen reserves his respect for “the people who became writers because yakking and tweeting and bragging felt to them like intolerably shallow forms of social engagement,” the ones who “want to communicate in depth, individual to individual, in the quiet and permanence of the printed word.” But as long as there have been books, there have been writers who’ve preferred yakking and bragging to quiet and permanence. In the 1880s, there was Oscar Wilde on lecture tours. In the 1960s, there was Truman Capote on “What’s My Line?” … Other literary writers have won prizes, or Oprah’s endorsement. Other writers have appeared on Time’s cover, or have been able to shun social media, but only Franzen’s done it all. From his privileged perch, he can pick and choose, deciding which British newspaper gets the honor of running his 5600-word condemnation of self-promotion that ends with an unironic hyperlinked invitation to buy his new book. Few—no—other writers have it so good. For the rest of us—commercial and literary alike—there is social media for fun, ads and tours for publicity, billboards and book trailers only if we’re lucky.

Kevin Pires details how “Jonathan Franzen Is Wrong Again: Why Twitter Is Great for Writers.” Mic Wright belittles the novelist as “the non-thinking person’s thinker, a snap, crackle and pop insight peddler trying to do a Malcolm Gladwell”:

Franzen thinks technology and those who build and use it are what’s wrong with the modern world. The real problem with the modern world? The veneration and promotion of tedious bores like Jonathan Franzen. The short conclusion is that Franzen hates technology and hates those of us who don’t. … Here is Franzen on Jeff Bezos, a man who has done more to keep good writing alive in his purchase of The Washington Post than Franzen’s literary novels ever could:

In my own little corner of the world, which is to say American fiction, Jeff Bezos of Amazon may not be the antichrist, but he surely looks like one of the four horsemen. Amazon wants a world in which books are either self-published or published by Amazon itself, with readers dependent on Amazon reviews…and with authors responsible for their own promotion.

Oh shock! Oh horror! Strip away the paranoid tone and what you’re left with is this: Amazon is a business. It wants to serve its customers and shareholders. It likes making money and it will assist writers without the traditional publishing industry acting as intermediaries. It also thinks that writers promoting themselves and broadly controlling their own careers is a good thing. What monsters. Birching is clearly too good for the devilish Mr Bezos.

Maria Bustillos suggests that such Franzen-hate has gone into overdrive, “since the most pointed of Franzen’s claims in the essay are so obviously true, or, at the very least, worthy of serious consideration”:

How come everyone got so sore, then? I believe part of the answer is that Franzen’s critics, cool kids almost to a man, from Mic Wright in the Telegraph to Dustin Kurtz at Melville House, were hit in a tender spot by this essay. Because what Franzen is railing against is not mere tech obsession but, rather, the intellectual and spiritual poverty, the weakness and the obedience, of soi-disant “creatives” who buy what they’re told rather than rage against the machine, who are too infatuated with their wonderful little toys even to look up from them while the world burns. Very few of us aren’t at least a little guilty of that.

Dustin Kurtz offers advice to those confronting “the horrors of agreeing with Jonathan Franzen.” If you’re not one of them, click here to test your ability to distinguish between Franzen’s gripes about technology and YouTube rants against saggy pants. Previous rounds of the novelist raving against the Internet here, here and here.

Eric Nusbaum explores the evolving culture of the exótico:

Mexico’s professional wrestling tradition, known as lucha libre, is a deeply ingrained part of the national culture. Exóticos have long been a part of that tradition: wrestlers who dress in drag and kiss their rivals, never quite revealing whether the joke is on their opponents, themselves or conservative Mexican society at large. Most working today are gay members of an often ostracized minority for whom lucha libre is a statement of pride, or at least a campy, unrestrained extension of self. …

The old-time exóticos had been straight men harping on tired gay clichés. In the mid-1980s, that began to change. A new generation of openly gay wrestlers reveled in the exótico’s sexuality, coyly tweaking stereotypes to confront the audience with the idea that being gay could be something more than a stage joke. They also ushered the exótico out of villainy.

Lucha libre’s organizing principle is good vs. evil: técnico contra rudo. Técnicos are graceful, honorable and skilled wrestlers. Rudos win with brute strength and by cheating when the referee’s back is turned. Where the early exóticos had been exclusively rudos, some of the new generation began to assume the role of técnico.

It’s not always an easy sell. Today, gay marriage is legal in Mexico City, but the overwhelmingly Catholic country still has one of Latin America’s highest rates of antigay hate crimes, and casual homophobia is deeply ingrained. Even progressive people throw around slurs like puto and maricón without a second thought, and when [star exótico] Maximo steps into the ring, he’s subjected to a string of insults. Observers suggest that lucha libre serves as an outlet for people to shout away their stress and anxieties, to let go of a long, hard week or month or life by drinking beer and engaging in the show. That chance for spectators to lose themselves in the action has been part of lucha libre since the earliest days. “Such catharsis,” Mexican poet Salvador Novo wrote of luche libre in the 1940s, “is not only hygienic, not only psychologically healthy, but profoundly Catholic.”

Update from a reader:

For an example of a “good” exotico, look no further than Lucha VaVoom and its star wrestler Cassando. He is a high-flying luchador known for his entertaining entrances. He has been, and is currently, a Champion, which is supposedly a first for an exotico.

Cornel Bonca details the five recently-discovered, unpublished manuscripts:

[T]his is the biggest literary “get” of the American 21st century.

The books include a World War II novel featuring Sergeant X from “From Esme,” the most intriguing character outside Holden and the Glass family that Salinger ever created. It includes a novella, in diary form, written by a World War II counterintelligence officer — Salinger’s job during the war — “culminating in the Holocaust.” Given Salinger’s war experience and his painstaking writing process, these two works could conceivably add up to a contribution to American World War II literature on a par with the work of Mailer, Jones, Heller, and Pynchon.

A third manuscript is, we’re told, a “manual of Vedanta,” a book explaining Vedanta Hinduism (and presumably, its relation to Salinger’s work), “with short stories, almost fables, woven into the text.” Finally, there are two compilations, one entitled The Family Glass, gathering all the published Glass stories together with five new storiesabout Seymour, the last of which “deals with Seymour’s life after death.” Given that once Salinger got going on the Glasses, his “stories” inevitably metastasized into novellas, this book is likely to be a real tome, and might conceivably be the greatest contribution Salinger makes to American letters, dealing as it must, with the question of how to live a genuine spiritual life in a postwar, post-Holocaust world.

Then there’s the final book, which [biographers David] Shields and [Shane] Salerno describe as “a complete history of the Caulfield family,” gathering Catcher, six previously published (and I would imagine, wholly rewritten) Caulfield stories written in the early-to-mid 1940s, as well as new stories featuring, presumably, Holden, Phoebe, Allie, and D.B. Caulfield. Five new Salinger books! Doubtless, they will make us entirely reconceive Salinger’s current oeuvre. If the books are even close in quality to Catcher or Franny & Zooey, they might reroute the course of late 20th-century American literature.

This week, the National Institutes of Health released a report on the future of neuroscience, which Gary Marcus calls “the first substantive step in developing President Obama’s BRAIN Initiative.” Marcus considers the report’s nine outlined goals:

The most important goal, in my view, is buried in the middle of the list at No. 5, which seeks to link human behavior with the activity of neurons. This is more daunting than it seems: scientists have yet to even figure out how the relatively simple, three-hundred-and-two-neuron circuitry of the C. Elegans worm works, in part because there are so many possible interactions that can take place between sets of neurons. A human brain, by contrast, contains approximately eighty-six billion neurons.

To progress, we need to learn how to combine the insights of molecular biochemistry, which has come to dominate the lowest reaches of neuroscience, with the study of computation and cognition, which have moved to the forefront of fields such as cognitive psychology.

(Though some dream of eliminating psychology from the discussion altogether, no neuroscientist has ever shown that we can understand the mind without psychology and cognitive science.) The key, emphasized in the report, is interdisciplinary work shared as openly as possible: “The most exciting approaches will bridge fields, linking experiment to theory, biology to engineering, tool development to experimental application, human neuroscience to non-human models, and more.”

Perhaps the least compelling aspect of the report is one of its justifications for why we should invest in neuroscience in the first place: “The BRAIN Initiative is likely to have practical economic benefits in the areas of artificial intelligence and ‘smart’ machines.” This seems unrealistic in the short- and perhaps even medium-term: we still know too little about the brain’s logical processes to mine them for intelligent machines. At least for now, advances in artificial intelligence tend to come from computer science (driven by its longstanding interest in practical tools for efficient information processing), and occasionally from psychology and linguistics (for their insights into the dynamics of thought and language). Only rarely do advances come from neuroscience. That may change someday, but it could take decades.

Recent Dish on neuroscience and the BRAIN Initiative here, here and here.

The organizers of the Man Booker prize announced this week that Americans will be eligible to win the prize starting next year. M.A. Orthofer applauds the Booker’s inclusiveness, but Radhika Jones protests:

[U]ltimately, the American inclusion would mean that the Man Booker is voluntarily ending its status as an arbiter of English literature—a canon with a longer and decidedly different cultural and political history than American lit, which the Booker itself played a role in transforming. Considering how quickly the Booker earned that arbiter status, it seems to me a pity to give up the prospect of continuing it.

Tim Parks is also opposed:

[T]he Man Booker Prize is simply following a trend which tends to weaken ties between writers and their national communities. … [Considering American novels] would reinforce the illusion that Britain and the US share a common culture. Above all it would contribute to a growing feeling that the author is an international entertainer rather than an artist involved in a home community with a literary tradition. In fact the rise of the international award goes hand in hand with the decline of the novel as a serious influence in national debate, or a medium where the native language might be mined and renewed. To top it all, the Americans, basking in a global power that confers cultural self-sufficiency, would be underwhelmed. No American author will prefer the Booker to the Pulitzer.

Leo Robson finds the hand-wringing unncessary:

Certainly the prospect, for a British writer, of a whole new category of competition, whatever the nationality, will not be welcome. But to imagine that Booker juries will be engulfed by a wave of American genius is to exhibit an odd inversion of Cultural Cringe, whereby the former empire becomes falsely convinced that, compared with those of a successful former colony, its own achievements are piffling, irrelevant, and drab.

Robert McCrum approves of the decision and puts it in context:

[I]n the evolution of English-language culture in the contemporary world, this is a small but significant milestone, a recognition that you cannot lay claim to being “most important literary award in the English-speaking world” and exclude the American literary tradition. …

Here’s the bottom line. Booker is a longstanding literary trophy. But no amount of longevity can disguise its essential character: it’s a lottery; a sweepstake. It has only a coincidental and fortuitous relationship with literary excellence. As Julian Barnes put it (in a phrase that’s almost obligatory to quote in these discussions), Booker and the other prizes are simply “posh bingo”.

Nora Caplan-Bricker applauds director Haifaa al-Mansour’s Wadjda, the first movie filmed entirely in Saudi Arabia:

[Mansour] was making the film for a Saudi audience—the only one that could truly understand the strictures its female characters face, and the one that needed to hear its message—and she didn’t want to run the risk that it wouldn’t be shown there. “I don’t want to work in a vacuum,” she explained.

The director chose a child for her heroine partly because pre-adolescents aren’t so rigidly circumscribed in Saudi society, and she needed Wadjda to be able to run around. The movie is all about mobility: It centers on Wadjda’s efforts to buy herself a bicycle so that she can beat her friend, Abdullah, in a race. Every time she reveals her plan, however, she’s greeted with a chorus of “girls don’t ride bikes!” A bike is anathema to feminine virtue, but it is also freedom from a life like Wadjda’s mother’s, who is stranded at home every time her grouchy driver decides not to show up. The right to drive has been a hotly politicized issue in Saudi Arabia for years, and it says a great deal about Mansour’s deftness as a filmmaker that the coveted bicycle can be both a potent symbol and the linchpin of a classical, poetically simple plot.

In the above video, Mansour explains what Wadjda means to her. In an interview with Alyssa Rosenberg, she discusses life in Saudi Arabia:

The relationship between drivers and women are very funny. It is very funny because it is a power struggle all the time. Because women, they think they are the boss since they are paying, and the drivers know that women cannot go anywhere without them. So they know that they are ultimately the boss. And women are not the best, like they are late, they don’t pay on time, but they are the customer, the biggest customer. So there is always a power struggle between the two.

Previous Dish on Wadjda, including its trailer, here.

Phyllis Rose considers the relationship between a writer’s life experiences and his or her work:

In his 2001 Nobel acceptance speech, V. S. Naipaul elaborated on this theme, that a writer has no life but what he writes. “Everything of value about me,” he said, “is in my books. Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn’t fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will—with luck—come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise.” Reading about Naipaul’s family, Indian immigrants in the Caribbean, we are likely to think, “What great material he had! How lucky he was!”

But Naipaul anticipated the thought. “Perhaps you might feel that the material was so rich it would have been no trouble … to get started and to go on. What I have said about [my] background, however, comes from the knowledge I acquired with my writing.” The writer, that is, begins in confusion and nothingness and writes his way into form and clarity. At the start of Naipaul’s career, all around him were “areas of darkness.” His own novels wrote these areas of darkness into form, so now we think of the Caribbean and other third-world places as Naipaul’s “natural” material and naturally interesting.

The material does not make the work. The life does not make the art. Exactly the opposite.

The work creates the material. The art creates the life. Did Trinidad exist before Naipaul? Did cargo ships exist before Joseph Conrad? Did Newark and the New Jersey suburbs exist before Philip Roth? Did women in playgrounds in New York City exist before Grace Paley? See how the writer invents the material? These places did not exist as literary subjects. They were invisible to literature. The magic of a great book is that it makes its own subject seem inevitable. The danger is, it makes the subject seem like the source of power in the work. It makes people think that all they have to do is position themselves in the right place at the right time, and they can produce a great book. In the past, it was conceivable for a young man who wanted to write to go to sea, like Conrad or Melville, in pursuit of his literary ambitions.

Writers’ lives seem interesting after the fact because writers have irradiated and transformed their own experience. But there is nothing intrinsically interesting about them. Writers spend more time inside at a desk than anyone except office clerks. Prison has proved a remarkably supportive spot for writers from Cervantes onward.